The Port-Wine Stain
Page 18
What do you think, Moran? Have I told it well? Are you convinced of its truthfulness?
I might write it up as a reminiscence. I’ve written some factual accounts of the war. My book A Field Surgeon’s Notes is in the Jefferson Medical College library. I wonder what Dr. Mütter would have said to that. I dedicated it to Walt Whitman so that he’d be sure to read it. He praised its poetical style. Yes, I really ought to pen an account of our meeting. Maybe I’ll include “The Port-Wine Stain” as an apology to Edgar for having robbed him of his manuscript. His story would help mine to be published—don’t you think?
You’re leaving, Moran?
By all means, you don’t want to miss the exposition. Be sure to visit the Army Post Hospital and see Eakins’s great picture of Dr. Gross’s clinic. When you stand in front of it, look for me among the young men sitting bemused in the painted darkness. But hold fast to your own story, Moran, because it’s all too easy to become lost in someone else’s.
There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.
—“The Premature Burial,” E. A. Poe
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My gratitude remains constant for those who have been steadfast in their devotion to me or to my work (they are, to my mind, indivisible): my wife, Helen; my children, Meredith and Nicholas; their spouses, Andy and Alexis; my mother, and (felt even now) my late father; as well as my publisher (and friend), Erika Goldman, and extended family at Bellevue Literary Press—Jerome Lowenstein, M.D., Leslie Hodgkins, Crystal Sikma, Molly Mikolowski, Joe Gannon, and Carol Edwards.
I ought not to forget to acknowledge the past American literature that, in recent years, has nourished me and my own attempts at contributing to it. It bears discovering or, as in my own case, rediscovering, if not for its relevance, which readers of my own time may dispute, then for its expression of the mind of its age, whose thoughts have gone toward the making of our own. I would not wish to be a literary conservationist, nor would I be a satirist. I would hope to be a twenty-first-century writer of American novels that speak to my own time through the literature that preceded them and, inevitably, give them shape and substance.
I acknowledge a debt to the historical record and ask forgiveness of those who will see in this novel certain liberties taken with it. Most flagrant of these instances may be my having brought forward, in time, the year of Poe’s first meeting with Sarah Whitman (from 1848 to 1844). Dickey’s suicide is another case of license taken. While I have been mostly careful of fact, I have written a fiction clad in history for the sake of verisimilitude. Mr. Poe, I beg your pardon for this concession to storytelling and also for my having borrowed some of your words and for having given you and Dr. Mütter mine to mouth.
Much of the text for the paragraph concerning the cause and treatment of insanity was taken verbatim from Proceedings on the Occasion of Laying the Corner Stone of the New Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, at Philadelphia, Including the Address by George B. Wood, M. D., Senior Member of the Medical Staff of the Pennsylvania Hospital, etc. etc., published in Philadelphia by T. K. and P. G. Collins, Printers, 1856. I found this informative pamphlet in the digital collection of the US National Library of Medicine.
Regarding form and influence, my use of an Interlocutor and end men has more to do with John Berryman’s Dream Songs than to a discredited minstrelsy. I ask my contemporaries to pardon it and also my use of certain nouns and pronouns that are unacceptable in our own era but were common usage during the years when my narrator was flesh and a living voice. I can only wish that the vices of the past had not survived into the present, which seems—in Berryman’s words—a “funeral of tenderness.” I can only hope (forlornly) that virtue—a word so old-fashioned as to sound ridiculous to our ears—will shed a benign influence over us through the “imponderable fluid that is everywhere present in the universe.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. His most recent books are the short story collection Love Among the Particles, a Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year, and two previous books in The American Novels series: The Boy in His Winter, a re-envisioning of Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which Scott Simon of NPR Weekend Edition said, “make[s] Huck and Jim so real you expect to get messages from them on your iPhone,” and American Meteor, an homage to Walt Whitman and William Henry Jackson named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year.
Lock has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series.
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